


it’s loud and it’s tasteless

by ghost_teeth



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Non-Binary Party Poison, Non-Binary Show Pony, Sharing Clothes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24799099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_teeth/pseuds/ghost_teeth
Summary: the clothes make the killjoy.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 21





	it’s loud and it’s tasteless

**Author's Note:**

> same headcanons as a couple of my other fics, but they’re definitely not required reading for this. (if you’re curious: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23145064 and https://archiveofourown.org/works/23656708)

Maybe it’s something to do with the moon, some kind of sinister alignment of celestial bodies, something on the air that puts Party Poison in one of those moods. It’s the kind of mood that sends them out on long lonely drives, makes them scratch at spots real and imagined on their face until they bleed, leaving angry red craters that last for a week or more and scar badly. It’s a festering, blistered sort of mood, the sort that makes them want to be ugly, to confess the very worst things they can think of.

Party’s always liked to tell stories, the big and dazzling guts-and-glory kind that are part true, part better-than-true. They’ve got dozens of ‘em. Days like this, though, if you catch them just right, they might tell you the one about the boots. 

The one about the boots goes like this:

Two kids, one biggish and one smallish, right? They’re both soft little things, all big-eyed and hungry and living like cactus mice, only coming out at night to skitter from one hidey-hole to the next. 

They’re all wrong for this hot dead place, these kids, but the place they left is even worse.

Nights in the desert bring a sharp and thirsty cold, and once in a while, it gets bad enough that they’re drawn like moths to the lights and fires of others, desperately following any tiny promise of warmth. Most often, they’re driven away like rats from trash with curses and rocks, but every so often, they manage to pluck at some atrophied heartstrings with their bird-boned wrists and soft sunburnt faces. 

The guy’s a crusty old waster, crumpled and half-mummified by years of sun and drink. He says his name is Beans and he lets them share his fire and even lets them sip his booze, just so he can cackle at the way their faces twist up at the taste. He tugs the ends of the older kid’s hair with fingers like old roots and tells them through toothless gums they remind him of his daughter, his brother, an angel. The kid doesn’t flinch, but they’ve got their hand in their pocket the whole time, where there’s a sharp scrap of corrugated iron wrapped in newspaper. 

“I’m glad I met you,” Beans slurps at them late that night, and there are tears in his eyes. He’s gone, totally gone, cross-eyed and mostly passed out. 

The kids don’t mean to fall asleep, but they do, and when they wake up in the gray before sunrise Beanie is dead beside them, mouth full of orange vomit and reeking of shit. 

There’s someone crouched at the dead man’s feet, unlacing his boots—a stranger, thin and red-faced. He grins at the kids, a  _ ha-ha-you-snooze-you-lose  _ sort of grin, and the older kid is flying across the hissing embers of the fire before they really know what they’re doing. They hit the stranger with the full force of their meager weight, and the two of them go down, twisted together like snakes. The stranger’s hands are long and they fit perfectly around the kid’s throat. It’s surprise alone that gets the kid’s make-believe knife between the stranger’s ribs before he throttles them. The kid hears themself screaming—no, roaring. It’s an animal sound, the ugliest they’ve ever heard.

The stranger is young, maybe younger than them, even. His hands are soft and some of his clothes are still clean and white. This is the first person the kid’s ever killed. It won’t be the last.

The kid wipes their hands off on Beans’ shirt—the man that shared his fire, called them an angel—then finishes unlacing his boots and hands them to their brother without a word. He’s been out here too long in just soft white shoes and he’s hurting bad, they know. 

It’s not until later that they throw up, when they’re sure their brother isn’t looking.

The boots are way too big, but their brother stuffs the toes with pieces of his shirt and wears them anyway, until he grows into them, until they fall apart completely. 

* * *

Wave scars are weird as hell, any longtime ‘head will tell you. Might be something to do with the radiation, how it fries your nerve endings. Fun Ghoul’s are still newish and shiny-pink, and something about them fucks with his sense of touch. Some bits of him are dead-numb, like touching somebody else, and other bits feel  _ everything all the time so much. _

After they hauled him out of the sun, once the bright fog dissipates from around his brain, once his skin knits into a spider-silk ruin, once he gets his name, Ghoul spends the better part of a month slinking around inside the darkest recesses of the diner half-naked and raw, unable to bear clothes for very long. Party snorts whenever they encounter him and says things like  _ we shoulda called you Salamander or Mole Rat. _

It’s Jet who finally finds an ancient shirt worn soft as a breeze at a swap-meet and buys it special for Ghoul (for way too much). The shirt is the color of wasps and Jet presents it to Ghoul like a cat bringing home a chipmunk, looking as pleased with himself as anyone’s ever seen him look.

The shirt feels perpetually cool against Ghoul’s back, warm against his front, somehow heavy on his shoulders. He will live and die in this shirt, he decides then and there. Somehow, whenever he pulls it up over his nose even years later, he always thinks it smells more of Jet than of him, just faintly.

* * *

Standing in the middle of the back office that serves as Party’s room is like getting shouted at from all directions. Everywhere you look, there’s something loud and angry—spraypaint, streamers, something sharp and dangerous, mountains and mountains of clothes in varying states of disintegration. 

Party themself presides over the chaos from the very top of a heap of junk, crouched over a corroded fragment of mirror like a gargoyle. They’ve got a little pot of something dark and chalky and they’re busy smearing it around their eyes with one grubby finger. It gives their face an eerie, skull-like cast, makes their pale eyes look remote and terrible. Jet can’t decide if the entire effect is spoiled or enhanced by the filthy white lacy thing they’ve wriggled into. They look like a haunting, like something that’s been buried and dug back up when it shouldn’t have been.

“You want what now?” Party glances imperiously down at Jet from atop Shit Mountain.

It’s general knowledge that you don’t go in Party’s room without explicit permission, despite the fact that there’s no door. Jet gathers the scraps of whatever courage carried him this far and says, “To borrow. Uh. Something.”

Party scrubs the remainder of the black stuff over their lips, then wipes their finger off on the disgusting nightgown. “Gotta be specific, babe.” They prop their elbow on their knee and their chin on their hand. “Borrow what? Screwdriver? Cup of sugar?” They smile an absolute shithead grin, and there’s black makeup on their teeth.

“Something to wear to the show,” Jet says, careful to keep his voice steady and his eyes on Party. You don’t show weakness around Party, particularly when you’re asking them for something. It’s like running off desert coyotes that get too brave—try to look as big as possible, make yourself a threat.

“You got clothes. You’re wearing ‘em.” But they’ve already started picking through the pile they’re sitting on, tossing things aside.

Jet resists the urge to smile. “Something, you know. Interesting. Something new.” He shrugs. “I don’t feel like being myself tonight.”

Party doesn’t look up from their search. “Yeah? Somebody else you wanna be?”

There’s an upturned milk crate that doesn’t seem to be part of the structural integrity of any of the piles, so Jet takes a seat on that. This is the part where he’s allowed to relax, where he’s allowed to take liberties. “Make somebody up for me,” he says. “Give ‘em a name. Tell me a story.”

The dress is black and aggressively triangular and the boots are ankle-breakingly tall. There are black ribbons and Party winds them around Jet’s limbs like garland on a Christmas tree.

“Her name’s One-Shot Roxy,” says Party dreamily, talking to the dress more than to Jet. They shove a pair of dark sunglasses with one cracked lens onto Jet’s nose. “That man had to go, and she knew what she had to do, yanno? He wasn’t no good for anybody. It just took the one shot. Boom. Now she always does what she’s gotta do. And it never takes more than one shot.”

“You think I’d waste a second bullet?” drawls One-Shot Roxy, pushing her sunglasses up her nose. “Never.”

“A lady doesn’t let things go to waste,” Party purrs, and leaves a smeared black lip-print on One-Shot Roxy’s cheek.

It’s too dark at the show for sunglasses, the sort of place you wouldn’t want to be wearing impractical shoes. It’s the kind of show where noses get broken. But One-Shot Roxy doesn’t take her sunglasses off, and never loses her balance.

* * *

After the dust settles and everything gets so much quieter, somewhere in a dark and unloved corner of the radio station, there’s a cardboard box sealed shut with uncountable layers of tape. Inside there are colors—blue and pink and green, riotous prints. There’s a pair of combat boots painted pink (it took five bottles of nailpolish and Pony never forgave him for raiding their stash), a glittering purple jacket with half its sequins missing (Party told him once it was his color), a pair of jeans graffitied all over with marker and paint (there’s a cobra drawn shakily on one of the ass pockets). 

It’s a box full of clothes for a cartoon character with a silly cartoon name, for a kid, not a man. Every year that passes, the colorless man who haunts the radio station adds another layer of tape to the box, just so he’s never tempted to look inside.

* * *

Picture this: Halloween party, third grade class. Picture cupcakes (sugar-free), lemonade (pink), jack o’lanterns of orange construction paper with carefully friendly faces (nothing scary, that’s not what Halloween is about anymore). There are costumes, of course there are—construction worker, firefighter, authoritative little figures in white plastic masks—nice, productive costumes broadcasting professional aspirations. The teacher is wearing a cardigan and nice flat shoes because she’s an adult. There’s also a clown.

The clown isn’t a real clown, just a kid with a purple greasepaint smile in a polka-dot suit four sizes too big. It’s the sort of costume that gets passed down through large families for whom things like holidays can’t be a priority, going yellowish and rank over the years but never getting washed. 

The teacher is passing out cupcakes. She goes to place a cupcake on the desk in front of the clown and stops short. She calls the clown  _ sweetie _ , offers a reminder that everyone was supposed to dress up as what they want to be when they grow up. 

The clown thinks about this for a second, gazing longingly at the swirls of orange frosting atop the cupcakes, more than the clown has eaten in days, just out of reach. Finally, the clown nods, silently.

“Let’s talk after class,” says the teacher, and moves on down the row of desks. The little square napkin in front of the clown remains empty. The clown folds it into a smaller square, then a smaller one, silent, carefully thinking of nothing in particular. 

After the cupcakes, it’s recess, and four tiny pretend-Exterminators back the clown into the small dark nook beneath the big slide. It’s a quiet, serious sort of chase, and the lunch attendant studiously looks elsewhere. The clown is crunched so small beneath the slide that the pavement grinds raspberries into their already bruised knees, and they know that the costume is getting torn and stained beyond recovery. The purple polka-dots of the costume stare up at the clown like little accusing eyes. 

The clown thinks about seeing the teacher after class, about walking home alone, about spending the evening crouched like a fawn in other small places, careful to be neither seen nor heard by the larger animals at home. 

When the bell rings the kids back inside, the clown resolves to be quiet just this once, just this one more time. The slide is a good hiding spot, and the clown is used to staying small and still for long periods of time. 

It’s funny how you can stick out like a polka-dot beacon in class but the moment you’re out of sight, it’s so easy to forget you, the clown reflects. Maybe this is what everyone was waiting for all along. It’s dark now, quiet and still in the playground, and the clown carefully unfolds from under the slide and starts to laugh, and to walk, no destination in mind. Their blood is loud in their ears and their teeth chatter from cold, and they savor every little sound.

Subsequent years spent grubbing in the Lobby and more spent wheeling through the desert turn the clown a little taller, a little stranger, a lot louder. They become unforgettable. But they keep the polka-dots always, and sometimes, when they’re feeling a little sentimental, they paint their lips purple and smile like an animal backed into a corner.

* * *

He knows he’s grown the day he pushes his sibling’s face into the dirt for the first time. 

There’s a constellation of blood droplets in the dust from somebody’s busted nose (could be either one of them) and the kid’s ears are ringing from when his sibling slapped both sides of his head to disorient him. They fight ugly, his sibling, uglier than anyone else he’s ever fought—and he’s fought a lot of people by now—and the only way to beat them is to get on their level. He’s got one of their skinny arms wrenched up behind their back and his hand is fisted in their hair, grinding their face into the ground hard enough to leave scrapes that’ll last.

“Say it,” the boy murmurs, and it comes out quieter and calmer than he would have expected with his heart pounding the way it is. He’s never won before. He could do a lot worse, he realizes. He could hurt them as bad as he wants. He wishes the realization felt worse than it does.

All at once, his sibling’s limbs go slack and they stop snarling and spitting. “It’s yours,” they mutter into the ground. “Jacket’s yours. Now fuck off.”

They separate without fuss and immediately put a cushion of distance between them, to give the moment some breathing room. His sibling makes a phlegmy noise and tips their head forward to let their nose bleed out, but they don’t lunge for him again.

The jacket is lying where they tossed it at the beginning of the fight, its warm leather racecar-red against the dust. The kid puts it on and touches the stylized snake decal at the breast. Later, once his sibling’s nose has stopped bleeding and the boiling of their blood has settled to a simmer, they’ll tell him it’s a cobra, and that they have a great idea for what he ought to call himself.

* * *

Sometimes, it’s Jet’s bandanna—the black one with the pink polka-dots. Other times, it’s that soft maroon shirt Kobra wears to sleep, the one with MENARDS printed on it in cracked white letters. Once in a while, it’s clattering strings of costume jewelry from Party’s stash.

He’s not subtle about it. They all notice him wandering around with Jet’s bandanna around his neck, or Kobra’s shirt under his vest (tucked into his jeans because it’s too damn big). Nobody says anything. Ghoul takes clothes. It’s common knowledge. He gives ‘em back, anyway. When he’s done with them.

Maybe on those days when he’s got the bandanna, he’s quiet and watchful, stiller than anyone’s used to seeing him. Maybe when there are strings of plastic pearls wrapped around his neck and his wrists, he smiles like something sharp-toothed and hungry, stands taller and talks louder. 

He tries them all on, at one point or another, wearing their lives just for a little while. Maybe he doesn’t have enough clothes for anyone to borrow, but he’d lend them if anyone asked.

* * *

The vest comes from Kobra. It’s been years since he grew out of it, but he still liked to bunch it up to use as a pillow sometimes. It still smells like his hair when the Girl puts it on for the first time, and even though Kobra never wore it, she swears she can feel the shape of his shoulders in it, the warmth of him like when she curls up next to him on those nights where there are too many weird sounds in the old diner. 

(She grows out of it so much sooner than she would have expected, even though she wears it until it’s so tight that it hurts her armpits and the seams split, spilling white filling. She keeps it in the bottom of her bag. No sense letting a good pillow go to waste.)

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> sadder than i meant it to be whoops
> 
> everyoneissquidwardinpurgatory dot tumblr dot com or @flamingo_tooth


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